Dear Colleagues,

The construction sector is responsible for a significant contribution of pollutant gases worldwide and one third of energy consumption. The highest consumptions of energy are mainly due to heating and refrigeration. The construction industry must be reformed toward zero-emission, efficient, and resilient buildings. The main actions to achieve these goals are urban planning, new buildings, building retrofit, reduction in energy consumptions, materials, resilience of buildings, and use of clean energy. However, non-explicit actions are required to address emissions within the building sector. For this reason, it is necessary to mitigate building emissions, use renewable energy sources and low-carbon building materials, improve building envelope, develop nature-based solutions, and optimize equipment and system efficiency. The most relevant areas to study, including experimental and numerical analysis, are the following:

• Materials in the construction sector must be analyzed based on lifecycle assessment to improve sustainability in the construction field: the use of natural and local materials such as stones, timber, clays and so on; or advanced materials such as phase-change materials (PCM), nanoparticles or gamma rays in construction materials, among others;
• The use of renewable energy sources and mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions of the building, moving toward the concept of zero-energy buildings and a self-supply energy scheme;
• Innovative and sustainable solutions for new buildings such as nature-based solutions, passive house design and active buildings and innovation;
• Sustainability in building recovery and conservation, and retrofit solutions, taking into account energy efficiency, thermal comfort, materials, and techniques applied.

This Special Issue aims to collect research and review papers focused on numerical and experimental analyses to improve sustainability in the construction field. The possible topics for submissions include but are not limited to the following:

• Sustainable materials;
• Advanced materials;
• Renewable and clean energy;
• Thermal energy storage;
• Energy efficiency of buildings;
• Nearly zero-energy buildings (nZEB);
• Zero-energy buildings (ZEB);
• Passive and active building-envelopes;
• Sustainable solutions for building recovery and conservation;
• Sustainable construction operations;
• Greenhouse gas emission and absorption;
• Lifecycle of building materials and operations.

Prof. Dr. Mar Alonso-Martinez
Prof. Dr. Inés Suárez-Ramón
Prof. Dr. María Mitre
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• construction materials
• energy efficiency
• nature-based solutions
• building and heritage conservation